I wanted to get lost in Helldivers this weekend but cross-play and cross-save have been a joke http://www.ign.com/blogs/ethangach/2015/03/15/helldivers-and-the-problem-with-games-that-dont-work-as-advertised - 2 weeks ago

Playstation Now Might Not Be The Game Changer We Thought It Was

"If Gaikia concept art is to be believed, Playstation Now may charge around $5 to $6 for you to rent and stream PS3 games," said IGN's Daemon Hatfield earlier this week. While the rumored price point isn't implausible, it certainly raises a few questions if later confirmed to be accurate.

When Sony released more details about the service during January's CES 2014, I noted that Playstation Now could potentially be priced in two different ways. Either the company could charge for streaming rights per game, or it could potentially charge a flat monthly fee for access to an extended library of content. Given the way Playstation Plus works, including a flat monthly fee that provides users with both free games as well as discounts for others, I'd expect that Playstation Now would employ a similar sort of hybrid model for charging consumers.

According to a brief survey of a number of commenters in the MyIGN community, a plurality would be willing to pay somewhere between $10 and $30 a month for Playstation Now content. Assuming that the library of available content is initially rather shallow, and remains that way for sometime after the service is officially rolled out, the $5 to $6 price tag per individual streaming rental seems in line with that.

Of course, what remains to be seen is how long rentals last. Will $5 get you 48 hours with Far Cry 3, or only 24? Will Sony offer a monthly subscription that comes with a set number of rentals for the month, or with access to all of the content available on the service, or will Playstation Now not be subscription based at all?

Because rentals would need to be streamed rather than downloaded and playable for a limited amount of time, Playstation Now will necessarily be a lot more labor intensive for Sony than Playstation Plus. The biggest challenge for the company is likely to be how it can separate heavy users from more casual ones, and charge each group accordingly. Emulating PS3 content on distant servers involves overhead costs in a way that simply maintaining a library of downloadable content does not.

Whereas someone who pays $8 a month for Netflix and watches 10 hours of it a day doesn't burden the company that much more than someone who only watches a couple movies a week, any payment model that involves unlimited monthly access of some kind could lead to a certain subset of users taxing Gaikai servers for hours and hours, day in and day out. $30 a month for that kind of usage isn't likely to cut it, though $5 per 48 hours just might.

But at that price, Playstation Now isn't likely to be a game changer so much as a super convenient digital Redbox. Especially if the majority of PS4 owners already own PS3s. Who is going to want to pay $5-$6 to rent Uncharted 3 when they probably already own it through Playstation Plus, or could order a hard copy through Amazon or GameStop for under $10 used?